By Peter Kurth.
587 pages. Little, Brown. $24.95.
Today all Dorothy Thompson’s books are out of print–they were largely rehashes of her newspaper columns and radio talks–and people tend to confuse her with Dorothy Parker. A decade after her death in 1961, she re-emerged as a minor heroine to gay women because of her affair with German writer Christa Winsloe; you don’t even hear much about that anymore. But Thompson’s friend John Gunther called her “the best journalist this generation has produced in any country”; after Eleanor Roosevelt, she was the most influential American woman of the ’30s and ’40s. She made her bones as a foreign correspondent–Hitler kicked her out of Germany–and by 1938, her column “On the Record” appeared in 170 papers.
Thompson’s warnings against Nazism and isolationism filled more than half her columns from 1938 to 1941, as well as her speeches and conversations (often indistinguishable). “With a clang like a powerfully swung hammer,” said another half-remembered Dorothy (Canfield Fisher), “she beat upon [the] general confusion of mind till the will to defend democracy was forged.” But as Peter Kurth’s admiring yet objective biography documents, the racket could get on your nerves. “If all the speeches she has made in the past twelve months were laid end to end,” said rival columnist Heywood Broun, “they would constitute a bridge of platitudes sufficient to reach . . . the cold caverns of the moon.” And her ex-husband Sinclair Lewis ungallantly paro-died her as “Winifred Homeward the Talking Woman,” for whom “more than two persons constituted a lecture audience.”
But where did she get the time to bend friends’ ears? In 1938, she wrote 132 columns, a dozen longer articles, 50-odd speeches, weekly broadcasts and a book on refugees spun out of a Foreign Affairs piece. (She got the energy from Dexedrine.) Predictably, her private life suffered from her public obsessions. No one could have lived with the alcoholic Lewis, but when sober he was often the sane one. Watching an American Legion parade, Thompson went on a rant about homegrown fascism. “Oh, Dorothy,” said Lewis, “let those men have a little fun! Some ofthem haven’thad a chance to get away from their wives for years.” In 1941, he asked for his freedom. “The meaning of Freedom,” she replied, “is the central question of the age we live in . . . "
In 1938, The Nation’s John Chamberlain wrote that “the best of Dorothy Thompson is her militant generosity. The worst is . . . an oversimplification and even a complete falsification of issues.” This sometimes turned her normally prescient politics crankish. She opposed social security, for instance, because of her “constitutional right to be insecure.” Her later anti-Zionism led Jews to forget she’d been their great wartime champion. Kurth is a trustworthy guide through Thompson’s political and personal vagaries, neither indignant nor apologetic. He’s insistent on just one point: that she was a woman worth remembering. This book should help. So would a selection of her best work. Publishers: your move.
